Whether it’s a journal page, a card, or a scrapbook page, we often like to add that little extra element of a border. One of my art friends, Tammy Northrup, has some great ideas for some ways to add borders to your creative projects!
Tammy’s love of flowers and gardening show in her work! Take a peek here on her website, MyFlowerJournal.com and give it a try! Don’t forget to share your Artful Adventures with us over on our FaceBook Group!
What do you do when you are totally stuck and really don’t know where to start on an art journaling page or a scrapbook page? Even if you are using a list of simple prompts, you may still need an extra nudge of inspiration! Here is an idea you may not have thought of – a way to look online for very random inspiration!
Layout inspired by music album cover art.
There are many places online to find images. However, we are not looking for something to copy, we are looking for inspiration. A couple of key places to look are Ebay and Amazon! The reason those are great places to look is because there are going to be so many things associated with a word you type into your search. If you are only using one of the regular search engines like Google or Bing, your search will really be much more narrow. The images that come up will be so closely related to your search word, that they will all be very similar unless you scroll down to page 1,000 of the search!
When you use Ebay or Amazon, you should have such random things come up that you might get an inspirational idea such as:
Let’s talk a little more specifically. There are often books and packaging that come up in this type of search. Why not use them as inspiration? You may take the layout of the lettering, the graphic design, or the color scheme. That would be three ways to use the look of just one book or package. That’s just the beginning! There are so many ways this could take you
Some ways that you might generate random images could be using:
What you come up with may be very out of the ordinary for your usual work! Here is another post about using prompts.
Have you tried this method of random idea inspiration? What did you come up with?
Do you ever feel like you just need a little nudge getting starting on a scrapbook page, or an art journal page? Let’s talk about that for just a minute! The other day, I announced that you could get a page of Inspiration Starters for free. It has 45 prompts that you can use for either scrapbooking or art journaling. Today, let’s talk a little bit about prompts and inspiration.
Simple prompts make YOU use YOUR CREATIVITY, like an ink blot test!
Some people like to have an idea spelled out for them, in kind of a “take this and do that with it” way. Since I like to urge you to stretch your creative wings, my inspiration prompts are a little more random that that. They are more like those ink blot tests!
If I say “BLUE,” what would you think of? There are many ways you could go with a prompt or idea that is just as simple as one word. Here are some things you might come up with for blue:
See what I mean? That’s what is so fun about getting less information with a prompt! When YOU come up with what you are going to do with the prompt, it is truly YOUR idea! So go ahead and get the sheet of “nudging” right now! When you let me know you want the sheet of prompts, you’ll even get a new sheet every month! By the way, blue is not on this list!
We have been taking a look at the color wheel and discussing some of the ways that color combinations can be made. One of the reasons I wanted to take you on this little artful learning adventure is to challenge you to stretch the way you look at the color combinations you use in your projects. Even if you know that you love a certain group of colors and they are your go-to colors, using a different method of coming up with a color palette, can introduce you to something new you may like. I’m not talking about just going completely opposite of what you like, I’m just saying that you may be pleased with using a couple of your favorite colors and just using a different method of color selection.
Tetradic Color Scheme
One of my favorite scrapbook pages I made last month is the one shown in this post. When I began to examine what type of color scheme this might be, I was surprised that it actually used a tetrad of colors – four colors. Another name for this is a double complementary color scheme, since it is two sets of complementary colors. The four colors in this method form a rectangle and on a more simplified color wheel you see that the short sides of the rectangle have one block of color between the points of color. Here is a look at this on the color wheel. For some reason, when I upload this to my website, it just doesn’t look the same, so you’ll just have to look at it and get the general idea that the four colors are yellow, green, blue, and the purply-pink color.
Here is a closer look at the page. Everybody should have someone this happy in their life! Even though this is a digital page, you can see how it would be so easy to create a similar page by stamping the background images, and then stamping the floral images.
If you’d like information on other color scheme selection methods you might like to see the previous posts on using a complementary, triadic, monochromatic, or analogous color palette. Do you have a favorite method yet?
We often have color palettes we know we are going to use, and sometimes we need something new or different to try for a project, whether it’s a scrapbook layout, an art journal page, or anything we are doing with color. Have you ever wondered why certain unlikely colors look great together, or how a color combination became so popular for a holiday or season? Let’s look at the old Christmas standby of red and green, and look at another method of selecting a color palette – complementary color schemes.
A complimentary color scheme is based on using colors which are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. So, you can see that red and green are exactly that – complementary colors.
In the case of Christmas, you can see that on a green tree or wreath, red makes a perfect color for decorating with green’s complementary color.
Sometimes a certain color or color scheme can elicit immediate connections because they are so familiar to us being used for the same thing over and over. It often makes us want to steer clear of a particular color scheme because of the immediate connection we have. For instance, in the United States, it’s hard to use a red, white and blue color scheme if it is not for a patriot theme (not that it is a complementary scheme, but you get the idea of how different colors schemes can become engrained in our thoughts). However, you can often use one of these combinations in a new way by varying the intensity of the colors.
Here is a scrapbook layout I did using green and red. Not only is not Christmas, it’s a completely different season. Because red is the complementary color of green, it brings out the color of the vehicle and the summer’s green grass.
Make a twist on a color scheme and share it by linking here in the comments, or share it in our Artful Adventures Facebook Group!
Previous posts in this series of methods to select a color scheme, discuss using a triad, a monochrome, or an analogous color scheme..